There's No Town Like Snowtown

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I knew nothing about the true story of the "Snowtown murders" in Australia in the '90s going into the film about them called, creatively enough, The Snowtown Murders. I remembered that Glenn at Stale Popcorn did not like the film, since that was the first time I'd heard of the film and the killings, but by the time I saw the movie this past weekend my memory of his nearly-year-old review was vague. And now, looking back at what Glenn had to say having seen the movie myself, I feel as if I can justify how much I liked the film - "like" isn't really the right word; more like "found effective" - because of what a different place I'm coming at the subject matter from.

I was not familiar with the true story, and I have not been inundated with an apparently historied Australian type of movie that Glenn melodically calls "the subgenre of suburban bogans being miserable and/or unpleasant." I suppose if I had to watch a lot of this thing, and he lists off a lot of similar titles that I've never even heard of, I'd felt as if I'd seen it all before too. Class-miserablism here in the States is more focused on films like Precious and Winter's Bone - issue movies; we get a lot fewer Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killers and Monsters here than they do, it seems.

But I was reminded of other Aussie flicks while watching this - the dull-eyed boy roped into criminality was reminiscent of Animal Kingdom, and there was a definite grunge-smattered Wolf Creek vibe to the horror - but The Snowtown Murders (retitled from the simpler Snowtown for us American rubes who hadn't heard of the murders) wound me tight in its awful grip all the same. And it made me feel awful, but that is how this movie should make you feel, you know? I was sickened by it, but not in a way like say A Serbian Film sickened me seemingly just for the sake of sickening me. I felt submerged in its horrible reality, but not artlessly so. To genuinely present the atmosphere where these sorts of real-world horrors can take place seems to me a noble endeavor (and I know a lot of people disagree with that statement) - we must look the monster in the face.

The folks in Snowtown aren't cartoons and they aren't ciphers either - they seem like real people behaving generally in ways I have seen people behave. I mean not the whole murdering thing, but the angry degradation of humanity in the face of nowhere out and no hope for anything better rang true, and it was all the more horrific for it.
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